carl@fire

Carl thought about it again. How'd she… His eyes lost focus, and the partly-eaten leftover burger in his hand continued to remain only partly eaten.

It was far from the first time he'd drawn a blank on the topic.

In fact, he'd been going over it again and again all morning.

We went in, and she said to start counting, and…

He blinked, remembering that he was disrespecting Annie's burger by allowing it to continue existing outside of his stomach, and set to fixing that while his thoughts…

His distracted state was something he was well aware of, and so were others. His friend Max had gotten back to him, and they'd had a brief call—which he couldn't even really remember at this point from his lack of focus—that they'd ended—if he did remember that part accurately, which he wasn't sure he was able to—with an agreement to talk again over the weekend. His meeting with Gab after that—which had actually happened fifteen minutes before its scheduled time because the whole upper part of the building was in a frenzy—had zoomed by in an instant, so focused was he on trying to make sense of a certain thirty seconds of his life.

Try as he might, however, answers continued to elude him. He'd been so consumed with confusion a couple hours after it'd happened that he'd gone back down to chat with Santiago at the front desk. The dour security professional had coincidentally been absent from his post during those thirty seconds, having taken a quick trip to the restroom—not that Carl had anything against people who used the restroom in the course of their workday, of course, because it would be pretty weird if he did—during which time the man had missed everything that had occurred. There would definitely be footage from the security cameras though, and…

And somehow there wasn't any footage.

Carl had persuaded the guard to review the morning's footage—and he'd actually found it kinda weird that the footage hadn't been checked already since, if he was a security guard, the first thing he'd do anytime he left his post was check the footage to make sure he hadn't missed anything—and they'd watched the playback on the security monitor, which was an encounter he was now mulling.

"Okay, here's you and a woman coming in the door," Santiago said in his patronizing Let's Get This Over With So I Can Get Back To Doing My Job And You Can Get Back To Doing Yours tone as he pointed to the small display under the lip of the desk's counter. He leaned back in his seat, seeming incredibly bored at the moment while Carl leaned forward, his eyes fixed to Vol's hand as she waved a less confused version of him to start counting.

Suddenly, the screen went black.

"What happened?" Carl said, turning to the guard.

The man shrugged. "Little blip. Happens every few months, usually when the cameras do their auto-update. Protocol is to do a full building sweep after, and we did."

The video returned a moment later, showing an overhead view of Carl standing in place, motionless, with nobody else in sight. After a couple seconds, video-Carl turned his head from side to side before turning completely around. He watched as the him from earlier that day moved quickly around the lobby, even going so far as to check behind and in some of the massive planters, before the front door opened again, and, after he'd visibly jumped from being startled, he'd greeted Terry and gotten pulled along into an HR Conversation.

"You drop something?" Santiago asked, looking up at him.

"Uh, yeah," Carl said as he scratched his beard. "White pen. Blended in with the floor tiles."

"Right," the other man said. "So you done, or…"

"Let me see basement two, section C—same time," Carl said quickly.

"Look, I'm already doin' you a favor, let's not—"

"Just that part of the basement, and then I'll leave you to it. Even put in a good word for you with John," Carl said, knowing the older guard was also one of the higher ups in the department due to his seniority.

"Alright, just this one," Santiago said as he made a bunch of handwave-y gestures in his AR interface.

But it had been the same there too. For thirty seconds or so, the feed was blank.

Carl brought his water jug up to his mouth and took a long pull, his brows swooping low over his eyes. How the heck… Where'd she go after?

It was one of many, many questions he had after seeing, among other things, a person disappear earlier in the day.

"Yeah, great, Greg. Glad it's working. Yup. Sure. Yeah, have a good one." Carl ended the call and pushed his glasses up to rub at the corners of his eyes. What's even going on today.

For a Friday afternoon, and especially for a Friday afternoon just after an expansion release, the office was bustling.

It was a weird kind of bustling though.

Usually, 'bustling' at Fire Entertainment meant that Engineering was slamming code into their repos, Accounting was rustling up some new porn-related malware to annoy him, tickets were piling up at an impossible rate, and Greg was on his case about something that wasn't even nominally his responsibility.

Today, however, the bustle was more like a reverse-bustle: he'd just gotten off the phone with Greg, who had called to thank him and say that everything was working great; Accounting collectively hadn't tried to visit any porn-related sites in days according to the network DNS logs; tickets were maintaining at an all-time low, which was great since it was the end of the week, and he'd told his team at the mid-week meeting that he didn't want anyone to even think about work this weekend, no matter how bad the ticket queue looked; Engineering was completely AFK—or maybe they weren't, but they sure as heck weren't in the office or doing anything that affected him, that was for sure.

The only semblance of regular bustle had been on the upper floors, which he knew from all the mails he was on CC for. He hadn't said anything to anyone immediately after the morning…whatever it was. First he'd had to investigate, and even then he still wasn't sure what he was supposed to say.

Gab had taken the initiative during their scheduled-for-eleven-but-actually-earlier meeting.

"Carl, you're a million miles away today," she called as he'd again lapsed into silence while staring at a wall and rubbing his beard.

"Huh?" He started. "Oh. Uh…" He blinked a couple times and tried to focus. "Sorry, it's a weird day."

Gab leaned forward over her desk with a sympathetic expression on her face. "I get it. I was just saying I have a shortlist of people I'm looking at, and I'd appreciate a second set of eyes before I send it upstairs with a recommendation."

Carl frowned even more deeply, and he returned to rubbing his beard. "Well, that's…" He shook his head. "I'm not sure w—This is gonna sound crazy, but I think it's…fixed?"

Gab drummed her fingers on her desk. "Fixed how?"

He blew out a breath. "Uh, well… You saw the machine in the basement yesterday?"

"Yeah. I went down to section C with Adi yesterday—smart guy, by the way—and saw it with my own eyes."

"Yeah, well, it's gone now. And I didn't wanna make it a thing with Data Management by going to check the servers two days in a row, but I'd bet all that's back to how it should be too."

Gab shot him a look like he'd cracked—which he definitely hadn't even though he knew how crazy all this was, but then again, the more he thought about it, the less sure he was about his sanity, although if he looked at it another way, obviously he wasn't about to have any sort of issues with that now since he was just a few hours away from a great, relaxing weekend with his family.

"It's gone from the network," he said more quickly, flipping around his tablet with the page open and then scrolling down to the clearly-missing entry for 10.10.100.137 on the LAN routing table.

She glanced at the screen before rising up out of her chair. "It's gone?" she said as she walked around her desk and started out the door.

Carl followed after her, his work tablet in one hand and mug of coffee that needed refilling in the other. "Yup."

"Where did it go?" she called back on her way to the elevator.

"Uh…" He hesitated, not having an answer that wasn't going to sound even crazier.

And indeed, just as when he'd gone down to check on it after stopping on the first floor to see Santiago, there had been no sign of the calamitous computer down in the basement when they'd gone, and everything related to that seemed to now have been miraculously restored to order.

A call notification popped up in the AR display of his glasses, and he sucked in a breath when he read the name. Ugh, that was definitely a bad idea. He cleared his throat and answered the call. "Charles, hi."

"Carl, I knew I made the right choice when I hired you," Charles Massey said in an enthusiastic tone.

Definitely shouldn't have taken credit for that, but saying I let my friend in to fix it isn't a good look—even if I have no idea how she did it—and claiming not to know is even worse. He sighed and rested his forehead on his hand as the conversation progressed, preparing to dig himself, Carl "Low-Risk" Weathers, into a deeper hole because it was the least risky option available to him.